Poetry for All

When I was a kid, poetry was a fun business.  We learned lots of poems by scores of poets, on all sorts of topics, most of them fun, fanciful things, that had to do with fairies, or adventure, or complicated moral lessons.  Of course, since a few decades ago, there's a lot of suspicion about all this received wisdom, and the ethnicity or social standing of the poets, and what gender they were, and so on and so forth.  But I really wonder whether we have replaced these pieces of verse---that's all they deserve to be called, apparently; when I was a kid we never distinguished between verse and poetry, but now we do---with anything of greater value, and anyway, who is qualified to classify these things?

Verse is easy to commit to memory, which is why there was such an emphasis on it in times when it was impossible to give each child his or her own book of verse.  I don't know how many centuries ago the practice of incorporating poetry / verse in organized education was begin, but I suspect it was at least a few centuries ago.  But now poetry has become a consumer item.  A poet is invited to give an evening of poems, and a few of those poems find a receptive audience, but nobody ever memorizes the verses.  There are a few notable exceptions, such as Maya Angelou, or Paul Simon, or Bob Dylan, or John Lennon, or John Denver, but the vast majority of modern poets are forgotten far sooner than the poetry we learned as kids.  Admittedly, those favored poets whose work was included in the grade school curriculum had an advantage, but I wonder whether we're better off.

I forgot William Shakespeare.  Blank verse is harder to memorize; it is definitely a more adult thing.  The few of us who learned Shakespeare in their late teens, and who had the support at home to make sense of it, certainly had something of value.  Shakespeare had an amazing way of presenting complex motivations without being heavy-handed.  The last few lines of Hamlet's soliloquy are powerful, but they remain Hamlet's feelings, not necessarily ours.  I do believe that that sort of poem helps to prepare us to follow the thinking of many people in their agonized moments.

The big emphasis these days is to encourage every student to write his or her own poetry.  Some poetry is certainly being written, and I know at least a couple of people who enjoy playing with words (which is a lot of what poetry is about), who might not have got into that pastime without the influence of high school poetry classes.

As I blogged in the distant past, the best poetic tradition seems to have found a home among serious composers of popular music, such as most of these mentioned above, and yet others, like Billy Joel and Carole King, and Joni Mitchell.  Some of these poets---Oh, let's not forget Neil Diamond---have been accused of being commercial (writing verse that would help their songs to sell), or too self-involved (and don't tell me that Shakespeare wasn't self-involved occasionally), but the lyrics are memorable, and surprisingly helpful quite apart from their purpose in songs.  A colleague in the English Department once said that song lyrics are a sort of bastard step-child of poetry.  Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it seems to me that song lyrics are definitely a strong entry in the verse department, at least in the last few decades.  Lesser-known songwriters such as Leonard Cohen wrote material that deserves to be called poetry by anyone.

I don't know where I'm going with this; a student once accused me of never being clear where I was going with anything!  Well, I'm retired, now, and I can indulge my tendency to be obscure.

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